Jamie Lynn Spears will never forget the worst nightmare of her life — when her daughter Maddie ended up in a coma following an ATV accident.
During the latest episode of I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here, the 32-year-old actress opened up about the scary moment when she “almost lost my oldest daughter” in 2017. Perezcious readers may recall Maddie had been riding around in an ATV when it suddenly crashed into the pond at her Louisiana home.
Related: Jamie Lynn Says She’s ‘Never Taken Anything’ From Britney
The then-9-year-old child was submerged underwater for minutes. And looking back at that horrifying moment before her little girl eventually was retrieved from the water, Jamie Lynn told her castmates on the UK reality show:
“She drowned, and we couldn’t save her. We tried really hard. She was trapped under a little side-by-side that we ride around our pond. My father-in-law, my mother-in-law, me and my husband, we run to jump in to save her and you kind of – in that moment you think, ‘This is not real. She’s going to pop up, this isn’t real.’”
Despite all of their efforts, she and her family could not get Maddie out of the vehicle. And in that moment, Jamie Lynn thought her daughter wouldn’t make it:
“I could feel her arm, and I’m jerking it, I couldn’t get her up because it’s a pretty heavy machine. In that moment you think, you know logically she’s been underwater too long. Nobody can live if they’ve been underwater this long. You logically are thinking these things. Then you hear the sirens coming. Thank God my mother-in-law, first thing she did was call 911. [Maddie] was caught in the safety netting. So when they got there, she was not alive. They took her from me and they intubated her.”
The Zoey 101 alum then remembered sitting on a rock covered in vomit as she overheard something no parent ever wanted to hear. Her mother-in-law called her own mom, Lynne Spears, saying:
“’Lynne, we’ve lost Maddie.’”
Heartbreaking. But thankfully, that was not the case. Seconds later, a firefighter rushed over to tell Jamie Lynn that Maddie had a pulse. They quickly rushed the kid over to the hospital. While things seemed like they would take a turn for the worse at first, Jamie Lynn said the family experienced a “miracle” at the hospital — Maddie survived:
“They airlifted her. She’s hooked up on life support, breathing machines and all that… they come in, [bring] a priest to read her her last rites, and when they did, her body physically sat up. Her spirit responded to it for whatever reason. She got better and better every day and walked out of the hospital. [She] has no repercussions. So that’s when I became Catholic. For about five minutes I thought I’d lost my daughter and then I was given the miracle of having her back.”
Getting choked up, Jamie Lynn added:
“My biggest fear was she was going to die thinking her momma wasn’t trying to save her.”
So, so sad. We cannot imagine how hard the experience must have been for Jamie Lynn, Maddie, and the rest of their family — even to this day. Watch her opening up about the terrifying experience (below):
[Image via Jamie Lynn Spears/Instagram, I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here/YouTube]